You know, I'd been seeing this "the web is dead" thing around over the last couple of days, but didn't know it was a Wired thing. I was just skimming over all the cites, thinking to myself "Man, Prince is prescient."posted by .kobayashi. at 12:04 PM on August 18, 2010 [4 favorites]

If they're using that graph as evidence that the web is dead, then it looks like *everything* is dead except video.posted by chasing at 12:07 PM on August 18, 2010

The Web is always dying. The Web is always reinventing itself. This seems to have been going on pretty continuously for the last decade, probably longer. Heck, we always seem to be pining for the Golden Age of our youth, even though it was only a little while ago and never existed in the first place.posted by GenjiandProust at 12:07 PM on August 18, 2010

Isn't that big chunk of video largely being served over the web? Or is that just steaming video?

Because honestly, streaming video is awesome, but it has a few very specific uses and its primary competition isn't the web, but rather television and movie theatres. In order to argue that streaming video is replacing the web or whatever, you would need to examine how much time the average person spends viewing streaming video and compare it to how much time the average person spends viewing television. I'd bet that actual use of the web (webpages loaded, time spent on the web) isn't actually down, but web use is down as a proportion of network usage simply because people are migrating from cable and terrestrial broadcast television to having their video streamed over the network to them.posted by Pope Guilty at 12:08 PM on August 18, 2010

That's a horribly misleading graph. I'd imagine that the bandwidth has only grown, so all those shrinking colors probably aren't shrinking nearly that much.posted by reductiondesign at 12:13 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Never mind the misleadingness of using relative bandwidth consumption - for fuck's sake, video sucks up a lot of bits, and peer-to-peer is mostly video. No shit video takes up a lot of bandwidth - I can squirt a lot of blog posts and twitter updates into the space taken up by even a short YouTube video. This is like saying that home cooking is dead because people spend more money on eating out. If you want to make a real argument that the web is dead, show me a graph where people are spending less time on the web.posted by Tomorrowful at 12:19 PM on August 18, 2010 [3 favorites]

My last issue of Wired is still in it's plastic shrink wrap, unread and untouched. I mean I could open it but what's the point? I read the monthly Microcenter ad more often than I do Wired.posted by hellojed at 12:20 PM on August 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it appears that internet traffic has grown from 1 Terabyte (PDF, and it's only US traffic, but still a useful data point) a month to 10 million Terabytes (global, estimated) a month between 1990 and 2010. So the actual amount of web traffic is still several orders of magnitude higher than it was twenty years ago, that's a very misleading graph.posted by Jawn at 12:20 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah, as EMRJKC94 says, the total bandwidth for Web apps is almost certainly still growing very quickly.

And measuring by bandwidth is just... silly. A good-size video might be a gig; a text article that says the same thing might be 50K. One copy of the same message gets delivered either way, but by this measure, the video delivery was 40 times as important.

That said, Lessig is absolutely convinced that the entire world is going to go video, and that the written word is going to become the province of the Morlocks. The Eloi will be video-only. And he's trying to communicate with Eloi, so he works very hard on video presentations.

I'm not sure he's right, but he's fearsomely intelligent, and his opinion is certainly worth considering.posted by Malor at 12:22 PM on August 18, 2010

The problem with their graph is that 1) it doesn't display the scaling of bandwidth used as pointed out by and linked to by others and 2) doesn't account for the fact video amasses a LOT more bandwidth quickly, compared to traditional websites. Even flash-burdoned sites won't amount to the sheer volume involved with video transmission.posted by filthy light thief at 12:23 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

I guess I don't know what "the web" is.

Is it all traffic served via tcp port 80 or 443 using HTTP?

Is it all HTML?

Is it all content served to one of the nearly infinite variants of "web browsers"?

Is it "stuff that's indexable by google"?

Most online video seems to travel over port 80 using HTTP, is invoked via HTML directives in pages, and plays in a web browser as a client.

The only conclusion that I can see here is that these folks have decided to segregate traffic by MIME types; seems like a questionable way to analyze traffic. Perhaps, like much of the web, it's like pornography. I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it.posted by jenkinsEar at 12:23 PM on August 18, 2010

I agree with everyone who points out that a bandwidth percentage graph is useless. By that logic, no one uses their mobiles for text messages.posted by justkevin at 12:24 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Does anyone else find these kinds of graphs really hard to parse? Am I meant to perceive the "E-mail" area as a thin strip, or is it supposed to be a large area which is overlapped by the "FTP" and "Web" areas? The drop shadows seem to imply that they overlap, while the numbers on the left side of the graph suggest otherwise. And the graph suggests some sort of height-based hierarchy which upon closer inspection does not actually exist. A simple line graph would be far more readable, but I guess it doesn't look as pretty?posted by oulipian at 12:26 PM on August 18, 2010

Only read the first link, so apologies if this is covered in the rebuttal, but most of the supposedly "not the web" things they list in that opening paragraph (apps, smartphones, podcasts, Skype, Pandora, XBox Live, Netflix) happen over HTTP.

Also, I personally don't do any of those things. So from my perspective it seems like yet another case of cutting edge types projecting their early adopter habits onto the population at large, although that's another, snarkier argument altogether I suppose. More concretely, I might point out that the graph is ridiculous because bandwidth used says next to nothing about more meaningful metrics like "time spent" or "value placed upon".posted by Slyfen at 12:27 PM on August 18, 2010

Print magazine declares death of internet. Hilarity ensues.posted by schmod at 12:41 PM on August 18, 2010

There's a second (or eighth or ninth, depending on how you look at it) problem with the bandwidth graph. Technologies that use more bandwidth will probably be disproportionately favored in such a graph. E.g., video will trump web, even if far fewer people are using it.posted by outlandishmarxist at 12:42 PM on August 18, 2010

The Web is dead

Flies Declare 3-Day National Holiday And All The Dogshit You Can Eat!posted by MajorDundee at 12:43 PM on August 18, 2010

Well, "The Web Is Dead" declaration is overdoing it a little, but it is interesting to note the shift from P2P to Video in the mid 2000s after Netflix began realizing its purpose and Hulu hit the scene... I used to BitTorrent 99% of my television (I had cable, considered it a poor man's DVR) until legit services made it easier, right around 2006. It's kinda neat to see data bear that out.

I don't have a fancy new-paradigm device, though, so most of my video still reaches me through the sturdy www.posted by maus at 12:44 PM on August 18, 2010

This is actually one purported reason why Microsoft ignored Internet Explorer after they released 6. They thought we were done with the world wide web, that hypertext documents had reached their limit, and they decided we were going to build applications with XAML and .NET and Silverlight, which, conveniently fits with the desktop monopoly in a way that would continue to make them the center of the computing universe.

Except instead people took advantage of previously underutilized capabilities in the browser and wrung a lot more use out of it as a universal client layer.

This is the thing the Wired article seems to forget. This app stuff reminds me of the early 1990s when networking was hitting its stride and everybody knew it was useful and client-server computing was a big buzz but you had to have dozens of little apps to be clients for this service or that service ... and you had to have a server setup on this subnet or that. Lots of little isolated puzzle pieces growing up in their own niche, rarely breaking out beyond that.

And then Mosaic and Netscape came and basically gave the world the universal client layer to rule them all. And the result has been pretty explosive and impressive.

What was in all those white papers about the web? Two words? Nobody at Wired remembers, really? Zero configuration. Your browser is the front end for millions of custom little applications. What else? Oh, it's a world of ends open to anyone -- b2b, c2c, b2c, c2b, buzzspeak is 10 years old, but whatever, the whole point was that these apps can be made available to you by anybody who understands the layer (open to inspection by anyone) and can afford web hosting and a programmer or two, no shelf space, no gatekeeper, just you and your potential market looking for each other however you can.

The universal layer wasn't suitable for everything. In the late 1990s, it was too slow for a lot of things handled on the desktop, and so those continued to be. And then computers got faster and the universal layer got extra capabilities when Flash became what Java applets were supposed to be and intrepid developers peered into the corners of what had been crammed into the browser natively and figured out to exploit it. And so 15 years in you can basically do what most people need to do with most desktop apps, right within the client.

The universal layer is still too slow for a lot of things on mobile devices, as it was in 1998. Hence apps. And some services lend themselves to nice tiny widget packages, and some activities aren't well-centered around remotely served documents. OK, fine.

But I'm going to bet that at most, this swing in the app direction is a temporary thing, as the balance between pulling computing activities off the CPU and pushing them off onto dedicated hardware is. Because the universal client layer is fundamentally a useful thing.posted by weston at 12:47 PM on August 18, 2010 [10 favorites]

Critical thinking might be dead, but not the web.posted by starman at 12:47 PM on August 18, 2010

Oh god. This was based on raw traffic figures. OF COURSE HTML TEXT IS GOING TO TAKE LESS BANDWIDTH THEN VIDEO!!! That doesn't mean that people are spending more time watching video then looking at HTML pages, ESPECIALLY WHEN MOST OF THOSE VIDEOS ARE EMBEDDED IN HTML!

UGH.

Sorry, that was just so completely moronic. Really, what they meant was that "The web isn't growing as fast as other technologies, so if you want to MAKE MONEY FAST trying to do it in the web isn't the way to go" The problem is the people at wired are TOO STUPID TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE

But that's really only relevant to venture capitalists and soforth. For people who want simply learn things and read about their friends or the world, the web is fine.posted by delmoi at 12:57 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Huh. I had a close tag in preview. Should have un-italicized after 'raw traffic figures'posted by delmoi at 12:58 PM on August 18, 2010

What kind of maniac lays out two single-column articles side by side on a web page?

What kind of maniac lays out a single article in two-column format? I see this often with PDFs targeted for reading online, and occasionally even on web pages. People just don't get that reading online is not like reading print. What, am I supposed to print it and read the printout?posted by charlie don't surf at 12:58 PM on August 18, 2010

Harumph. These pages look funny on my iPhone.posted by monospace at 1:03 PM on August 18, 2010

It is official; Wired now confirms: *WWW is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *WWW community when IDC confirmed that *WWW market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all bandwidth. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *WWW has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *WWW is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *WWW future. The hand writing is on the wall: *WWW faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *WWW because *WWW is dying. Things are looking very bad for *WWW. As many of us are already aware, *WWW continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

All major surveys show that *WWW has steadily declined in market share. *WWW is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *WWW is to survive at all it will be among text-based dilettante dabblers. *WWW continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save *WWW from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *WWW is dead.posted by Threeway Handshake at 1:06 PM on August 18, 2010 [4 favorites]

I, sort of half jokingly, believe that smart-phones are only a stop-gap to fully immersive augmented reality.

Browsing on a tiny screen is the absolute worst.posted by codacorolla at 1:07 PM on August 18, 2010

What? You'd expect a print magazine to have a cover story with the much more (but still not quite) accurate headline "PRINT IS DEAD"?!? So easily explained by the fact that Wired Magazine's editor has no authority over the web-based Wired.com but total authority over the Wired Magazine iPad Edition. So the Web IS dead for him. Media Person writes article denigrating medium he isn't making money from. It think Rush Limbaugh recently said TV was dead. Move along, nothing to see here.posted by oneswellfoop at 1:08 PM on August 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

The Web is evolving toward service, rather than option. The point is for the Web to already know what you like, and then give it to you, without you having to make a choice or a decision.

Oh jeez now that is just absurd. And it also really has nothing to do with the article, which posited that websites would be replaced with "apps". But most "Apps" for the iPhone/iPad are just thin wrappers for web services anyway. They make an 'App' because it's trendy, and it can sit on the home screen (not to mention you can charge money for it), not because they're using features that actually require a native app. In fact, a lot of iPhone apps are build on Webkit and javascript and are literally just locally served web pages.

The App Store has one feature the web really lacks. A single, universal, billing system. At least on that particular platform.

The people who wrote the article have confused what's growing quickly with what's going to take over Mobile Apps are becoming popular quickly. And some people have given up their PCs entirely. Will people give up their 'ordinary' computers entirely and replace them with locked-down iPads, or will netbooks just get smaller and more portable, while still working with the same old web?

A lot of it has to do with how net neutrality works out, and whether big corporations can finally lock down the internet, frankly. If they succeed we'll all be using iPads and anyone who wants to write programs will need to have them approved, and anyone who wants to make websites will see them slowed to a crawl in favor of traffic from major providers.

This chart, inexplicably an image, is especially dumb. Tell me again how a rise in Video and Peer-to-Peer traffic necessitates us all jumping to Objective C?posted by Artw at 1:10 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

would the people at Wired rather have 50% of a thousand dollars instead of 10% of a billion?

Wait, wait, I know this one! They're both the same! Right? And something about feathers?posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:11 PM on August 18, 2010

"The web is dead." is a journalistic connivence because "jumped the shark" has been taken, used, abused, tied up and forced to watch Regis host Snookie-week on E!. The web isn't dead, but it is going to be nothing but infrastructure for telecomm/wireless mondo-citizens like Apple and Disney.

We are going to be relegated to the wireless frontier, a digital Deadwood with Sheriff Steve Jobs and Meg Whitman runs the saloon.posted by Back to you, Jim. at 1:15 PM on August 18, 2010

Thank you all for railing against this article so that I did not have to. Friends kept linking the Wired piece and as soon as I saw "Wired" and "[______] is dead!", I immediately dismissed it to save myself the aneurysm.posted by cavalier at 1:19 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

The graph at the top of the Wired article is useless in a more important way than its scale: it's totally irrelevant to the article.

The point of the article is that we're allegedly consuming content more through single-purpose apps, and less through browsers. But for the most part, both kinds of content are transmitted via HTTP -- and in the graph, they both fall under "Web." The graph would be pretty helpful for an article explaining that half of our traffic is now video, but this article only uses the word "video" once. The graph is completely pointless.

I imagine that the authors/editors are simultaneously annoyed that their illustration is the only thing getting any discussion, and pleased that they're getting so much traffic to complain about it.posted by jhc at 1:26 PM on August 18, 2010

DNS took up 11% of traffic in 1990? Seems like a high percentage to me. Am I missing something?posted by Hoenikker at 1:27 PM on August 18, 2010

I can't decide if Chris Anderson is a fool, or just a guy who likes to make foolish statements to enhance his brand.posted by COBRA! at 1:27 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Web's dead, baby. Web's dead.

This informative Wired graphic was drawn by Bruce Willis while he rode his motorbike and fought the baddies.posted by MuffinMan at 1:31 PM on August 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

DNS took up 11% of traffic in 1990? Seems like a high percentage to me. Am I missing something?

I'd guess there was a lot less edge-caching of DNS entries back then. I mean, I used to work at a place that ran 3-day classes on setting up bind. It was hard to set up a DNS server in '90 so most places tended to use servers further way and thus the traffic was measured by backbone routers. Nowadays the backbone traffic is much sparser (I'm guessing).posted by GuyZero at 1:35 PM on August 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

"The web is dead." is a journalistic connivance because "jumped the shark" has been taken, used, abused, tied up and forced to watch Regis host Snookie-week on E!.

But "The X is dead" got overused years before "jumped the shark" was coined (by a web entrepreneur who probably wishes Trademark law weren't just a tool of mega-corps because he'd be freaking rich!).

We need a new cliche*. "Jumped the shark" has "nuked the fridge" and "nuked the fridge" never caught on. Wired Magazine tried its own meme in that vein: "WIRED vs. TIRED", but "The Web is TIRED" really wouldn't work. I think "PEAK X" as in "Peak Web" would work if major parts of the business and political community weren't trying to kill the original "Peak Oil" meme.

Anderson is like a Kurzweil or Diamond of tech journalism. Seriously, even after all the academic work using real-world data shows his "Long Tail" more resembles log-normal than power, the bampot ideas persistently accrete more truthiness because legions of useful idiots broadcast them as gospel. It's the death of discourse.posted by meehawl at 1:45 PM on August 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

The web is not in decline even according to that graph. I'm confident that 23% of today's bandwidth is greater than 55% of 2000's bandwidth.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

That's a horribly misleading graph. I'd imagine that the bandwidth has only grown, so all those shrinking colors probably aren't shrinking nearly that much.
posted by reductiondesign

The second link in this post- the Alexis Madrigal article from The Atlantic- is just terrific, and places Anderson's blather into historical context.posted by foxy_hedgehog at 1:57 PM on August 18, 2010

> And it also really has nothing to do with the article, which posited that websites would be replaced with "apps". But most "Apps" for the iPhone/iPad are just thin wrappers for web services anyway.

But the point isn't the technology; it's consumer behavior. It doesn't matter very much that what we call an App (tm!) is a thin wrapper for a webservice. What does matter very much is that users get accustomed to not going far afield in search of the stimulus they desire.

Look ahead to when YouTube becomes the anchorpoint for Gmail, and the question becomes which video/song do you want to watch/compose/send/upload from YourDigitalHub using your Android phone... and Here are the Nineteen Articles You're Going to Want to Read Today Before You Even Wonder About It... and Would you like some help composing your movie/song with some of our royalty-free models/beats, using one of our stored narrative formulas?.

The dominance of the search-based web is a blip; it won't entirely disappear, but it will be increasingly overshadowed by convenience-oriented, already-here-before-you-knew-to-ask-for-it services. Remember, the Early Adopter, innovation-and-novelty driven subset of the human hive is actually a comparatively small one.posted by darth_tedious at 1:57 PM on August 18, 2010

The Web is dead!

Linux is dead! Office is dead! Microsoft is dead! Email is dead! Facebook is dead! Blackberry is dead! Firefox is dead! The desktop is dead! The Ipod is dead! RSS is dead! Twitter is dead! The Wii is dead! The Netbook is dead! Print is dead! Openoffice is dead! Flash is dead! EReaders are dead!

If the web is indeed in trouble, I'll keep cruising on the information super highway then.posted by yeti at 2:45 PM on August 18, 2010

This chart, inexplicably an image, is especially dumb. Tell me again how a rise in Video and Peer-to-Peer traffic necessitates us all jumping to Objective C?

I imagine Wired, much like Rupert Murdoch, would like it a lot if you got all your content supplied by a selection of apps supplied through a store run by a single entity they can cut deals with - a bit like publishers buying self space in magazine racks and bookstores It' a model they know how to win at, rathe than this scary bullshit people ambling about and finding stuff that might be interesting, regardless of whether it's got the seal of approval of editorial boards appointed by a handful of plutocrats.

But the point isn't the technology; it's consumer behavior. It doesn't matter very much that what we call an App (tm!) is a thin wrapper for a webservice. What does matter very much is that users get accustomed to not going far afield in search of the stimulus they desire.

You're the second person who brought this 'push' idea up. But what does that have to do with "the death of the web"? I use Google reader to catch up with RSS stuff. And youtube is always making suggestions. Both of those are "on the web". They use HTTP and HTML and are displayed in a browser. Those are examples of the web getting more efficient, not it's "death". So it seems totally irrelevant to the article.

And anyway, it's not all that clear that that's what people want. I find it kind of annoying because the recommendations are so good and I end up wasting a bunch of time watching, like, babies laughing or eating sour food or whatever. It makes me click but doesn't really enrich my life in any way.

But in any event it's still "the web"posted by delmoi at 6:14 PM on August 18, 2010

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